Quick Takes: Drew Faust Seen as Harvard Pick, Education Management Hires Ex-Apollo Chief, Donation Rules in Conn., Senators Complain About Omission of Tuition Deduction, Drug Testing at Stout, Battle in Australia Over an Ex-President's Papers and Backside

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Both The Boston Globe and The Harvard Crimson are reporting this morning that Drew Gilpin Faust is likely to be selected Sunday as Harvard University's next president. Harvard's Board of Overseers has scheduled a special meeting for Sunday to approve a choice, the newspapers reported, with the Globe saying that there has been no other candidate under serious consideration this week, and the Crimson quoting sources saying that Faust is the candidate who will be selected. Faust is dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and has been credited with turning that institution, which was created just prior to her arrival at Harvard in 2001, into a successful research institute. She spent most of her career at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. and taught histsory. The author of five books, Faust is a highly regarded historian of the Civil War and the South who also has a reputation as an outstanding teacher. If she is selected (and reports about Harvard's selection process in the past have not always been accurate), she would not only be the first woman to lead Harvard, but she would illustrate the difficulty of predicting search outcomes. The conventional wisdom in Cambridge has been that Harvard's search committee was seeking a scientist and (of course) a Harvard graduate. Faust's undergraduate degree is from Bryn Mawr College.
The Education Management Corp., a major for-profit provider of higher education, announced Thursday that it had hired Todd Nelson, the former president of the competing Apollo Group, as its new president and chief executive officer. Nelson left Apollo, suddenly, a year ago.
Connecticut's House and Senate have now passed legislation to amend state ethics rules that were barring most corporate donations to public colleges, the Associated Press reported. Connecticut adopted strict limits on contractors that work with state government making donations, but those limits were based on several corruption scandals and the measure was not intended to hinder donations to colleges. While the University of Connecticut and other institutions have reported drops in corporate contributions, the new legislation is expected to be signed into law.
Two U.S. senators are decrying the Bush administration's decision to leave out of its 2008 budget plan funds to extend the $4,000 a year tuition tax deduction that is due to expire at the end of 2007. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said they had asked Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to explain the decision to omit the popular middle class tax break from the budget, and that Paulson had suggested they pose the question to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, which they said they had done in a letter Thursday. An Education Department spokeswoman, however, noted that the department has nothing to do with setting tax policy, and referred questions to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The University of Wisconsin at Stout is starting random drug testing of athletes, the AP reported. The policy was announced in response to police searches in December that found steroids and other drugs in the homes of two football players.
Di Yerbury, the former vice chancellor (president equivalent) of Macquarie University, in Australia, is involved in an unusual and personal battle with the institution. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the university has seized 125 boxes of documents and more than 1,000 artworks as part of an inquiry into Yerbury and a dispute over whether her art collection may have been "co-mingled" with the university's collection. One of the paintings is a portrait of the former vice chancellor of which Yerbury wrote in a memo that many people at the university who visited her home while she was leading the institution "didn't expect to see their boss's nude backside."